Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning from one of the most peaceful airports on the planet. Sorry, had to show you this.
What happens in the cornfield stays in the cornfield.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: That's awkward. Anyway, that's not what this video is about. I want to talk about Advent. Advent is a season of joyful penance and the Gospel. For the second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist shows us exactly how I'm going to find a peaceful corner in the world's most peaceful airport. Look at this. This is crazy.
If you're from Denver or la, this is amazing. I'm gonna find a corner, pull up a chair, and tell you exactly what that joyful penance looks like. Courtesy of John the Baptist. Okay, I found my happy place in the airport.
Let's let John the Baptist speak to us directly. It's from Matthew 3. John the Baptist appeared, preaching the preaching in the desert of Judea and saying, repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Fast forward a little bit. John wore clothing made of camel's hair and had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locust and wild honey. I'm guessing he didn't have the best breath at that. At that time, Jerusalem, all Judea and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan river as they acknowledged their sins.
Okay, when John the Baptist said to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand, what he actually meant is going to blow your mind. And I'm going to get to that in a minute. But first I want to look at his lifestyle as a preacher, as a guy who wanted to carry the good news of the gospel to people.
He had camel's hair for a cloak, a leather belt around his waist, ate locust and honey. This guy's lifestyle was absolutely intense. And the intensity was about stripping down and stripping away all the distractions that would come between him and God and between him and his mission.
Christian asceticism can look on the outside very much like Buddhist asceticism, where you're giving stuff up, but it's not about the same thing. You see, Buddhist asceticism would be about giving things up and the end goal is self negation.
The end goal of Christian life is love. It's union with God, is giving yourself in love to others.
So the reason that we strip ourselves down like John the Baptist did would be for the sake of the message and the sake of the love. He stripped all the distractions out of his life to make room not to disappear into the nothing, but to make Room for love.
And it's not the same goal as stoicism that we strip everything down to be morally good, though that's a side effect, and it's a very good thing.
We live morally good lives so that we can make space for love. That's how John the Baptist lived. So the question is, as you engage a season of joyful repentance to make space for the Lord, because that's what your heart is. Your heart is the inn where he's looking for room, what can you strip down? And it could be a sin that you need to cut out of your life, but it could also be something as simple as what distraction is taking over.
The cumulative effect of that distraction and that extra busyness, it can have the same impact on your soul as a grave sin over time.
I mean, guys, you'll notice that I wear pretty much the same thing all the time. I have, like, 10 of these T shirts. I don't want to be distracted.
As a preacher of the gospel, I want my mind to be sharp and focused and alert on the things that are most important. And one of the great tragedies in life is that the things that pop up all the time, the urgent things, the background noise, the things that pop up, the urgent crowds out, what's most important in life, that happens to all of us.
Dude, I don't want to live that way. I don't want to be in my deathbed someday looking back and saying, dang, that was busy. And I never gave my attention to the things that mattered most.
John the Baptist gave his attention only to the things that mattered most, as an extreme example. But what can we do as people who have to live in the world and in the muck and the mire of it all and the business of it all, to just shave down a little bit this Advent and focus a little more on the things that matter most. So that's lesson one, right? It's a beautiful lesson in.
And paring down in simplicity. But then lesson two. Okay, this is awesome. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Guys, I think repent is a really awful translation of the word that John the Baptist actually used. And it's also the word that Jesus used when he kicked off his ministry. And Erasmus of Rotterdam was the first to uncover that mistranslation.
When the gospel came from Greece to Rome, they took that word, that launching word, that inaugural word of John the Baptist's ministry and Jesus ministry, and they reinterpreted it as penitentiam because Rome was a Very legalistic society. And there was good things in that translation, because when we want to repent and come to the Lord, we actually do have to do penance and we actually do have to leave sin.
But it's lacking. See Penitentiam and fast forward. Repent has strong implications that the whole gospel is about leaving your sin and it's about behavior modification.
And don't get me wrong, if you're sinning, you should totally stop sinning.
But the word that Jesus used and the word that John the Baptist used here in the Gospel of Matthew is way more encompassing, way more demanding than merely behavior modification. In the Greek, it's metanoia, which means change your. And thank you, Erasmus of Rotterdam, for pointing this out.
Change your mind, change your thinking, change how you see and approach absolutely everything.
That's all.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Guys. When you do that and you put on the mind of Christ, which is the goal of conversion.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: Most of the stupid things you're doing and the sins you're committing will go away by default.
And Cardinal Cantle Mesa preached beautifully on this. And by the way, if you're not part of our Daily Anchor, make sure you click below this video. Sign up for the Daily Anchor because we have two videos from Cardinal Cantolemesa specifically for our audience, for our real life Catholic people, for the folks. Sign up for the Daily Anchor to encourage you. Enjoy and he will blow your mind. Okay, it's really a privilege to have been given this gift. But he said prior to Jesus, he's talking about conversion and how Jesus elevated the meaning of conversion. Because in the Old Testament, when there was a call to repentance, it didn't sound like what John the Baptist and Jesus was talking about. So he said prior to Jesus, to convert always meant to go back.
It meant to return to the violated covenant through a renewed observance of the law.
Return to me, says the Lord, through the prophets.
To be converted had a primarily ascetic, moral, penitential meaning.
And it was affected by changing one's conduct of life. So you could kind of chisel your life differently. Okay, so repent meant what you did. Locked you out of the kingdom, start behaving better to get worthy to come back into the kingdom.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: On Jesus lips, this meaning changed not because Jesus played with words, but because with him, reality has changed. The moral meaning becomes secondary. Boom. How cool is that?
At least at the beginning of his preaching to a new meaning, unknown till now, to be converted no longer means to go back. Okay, so what's it mean then? It means to Go forward.
It means to open your eyes to the grace of God that has been given you.
Look, if we have a primarily ascetic penitential meaning attached to repentance, we can fall into the lie that we're doing it by our own power.
There's a great saying, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
If you actually think about what that means, think about it. Go ahead, reach down, grab your shoes and pull up. See where you'll go? Nowhere.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Look, we can live under the delusion that when we talk about penitentium, that we're doing it by our own strength, by our own power.
I'm doing the stuff, I'm making the sacrifices. But when Jesus raises the bar and says, meta your noia, change your mind, change your thinking, take on the mind of God.
He's making it clear that, yeah, you can do penitential things as part of the process to open yourself to the grace, but you are now in over your head, buddy.
You can't take on the mind of Christ by your own power.
Conversion, repentance, metanoia.
This is about stepping into the grace of God. Not going back to the kingdom, but stepping forward and realizing the kingdom is now upon me.
Salvation has been given to me.
Salvation and conversion have changed places in the equation. The salvation is offered first and the Lord says, receive this grace that you could never earn.
Come with me up to a place that you can never pull yourself up to by your own bootstraps.
So this season of joyful repentance comes down to clearing the space out from the gunk and distractions. Sin is one of the ways we do that. There's a million ways we can do that. I don't know how God's telling you to do it, but make sure you do it in order to open yourself up to the grace of metanoia.
A grace you couldn't earn. A grace, a place you can't bring yourself to by your own power to put on more the mind of Jesus Christ.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Lord, help us to follow you like St. John the Baptist did. Help us to clear out the distractions and help us by your grace to take on more deeply your mind to make space for you as you come to us at Christmas, as you come to us at the end of our lives, as you come to us on the everyday. Amen. God bless you guys. Love you.
Stay on the Advent journey. Live it, make it real.
